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CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers

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Re: CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers

#91

Post by kevan »

brailsafe wrote: post #68

I bet some clever person on the marketing team just went ahead and inserted the tag. My first experience on a large corporate dev team was eye-opening. While the core product code was version controlled and reviewed, the marketing team had the power to insert any kind of scripts onto the page without clearance. In theory, anything new on the page would require many ridiculous meetings. In practice, they could and did…

Tealium was my worst enemy at a previous job. 5 different departments had access to dump whatever garbage scripts they wanted on the website with no auditing by devs to make sure it wouldn't break things. I eventually put in a feature flag to nuke everything from Tealium to help us debug problems because so many were caused by rogue scripts.

An unexpected side benefit was being able to demonstrate side by side the effect that 200 extra scripts were having on pageload times.

Re: CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers

#94

Post by rdiddly »

sumitgt wrote: post #3

Actually, why is this not a potential legitimate business model? I let you stream content for free and you let me mine cryto-coins with your spare CPU cycles while you watch. Isn't that better for people who don't like all the tracking by ads?

There needs to be consent on both sides, for it to enter the realm of legitimacy.

Re: CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers

#95

Post by jdavis703 »

tambienben wrote: post #78
edmccard wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We lose money on every sale, but we make it up in volume!"

If were talking about new monitisation schemes, can we not entertain the thought of using newer technologies better suited to streaming at scale? I'm thinking of IPFS in particular, but there are probably other solutions as well.

Such as WebRTC.

Re: CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers

#96

Post by JoshTriplett »

_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #83
wavefunction wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then your code wasn't version controlled and reviewed. I had a similar request for Google Tags and I explained my concerns to my CTO and voila, no Google Tags that didn't come through us.

It depends on the market pressure and resources you have. Low pressure, many resources (money) => Review/Implement all Google Tags changes High pressure, low resources (money) => Marketing can do their own thing to reduce pressure on the development team. HM and LL are somewhere in between. Classic trade off like most of the things in software development.

> High pressure, low resources (money) => Marketing can do their own thing to reduce pressure on the development team.

"Marketing can do their own thing" makes for more work and pressure on the development team. "Why doesn't this work in production?" "Why is this slow in production?"

Nobody gets to skip CI, or work without coordination.

Re: CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers

#97

Post by callumjones »

brailsafe wrote: post #68

I bet some clever person on the marketing team just went ahead and inserted the tag. My first experience on a large corporate dev team was eye-opening. While the core product code was version controlled and reviewed, the marketing team had the power to insert any kind of scripts onto the page without clearance. In theory, anything new on the page would require many ridiculous meetings. In practice, they could and did…

NewRelic doesn’t let you add random JS, it only injects their browser monitoring script. Don’t spread fake news.

Re: CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers

#98

Post by dmichulke »

Here's a gray market "business model":

- Hacker H hacks site, injects cryptomining script

- Because H doesn't want other hackers to do the same, he will make the site secure and thereby kind of "maintain" it (in a security sense)

- Because H doesn't want the site to slow down endlessly, he will use cryptomining "as much as possible" while still keeping the site sufficiently responsive (otherwise traffic would go down and net income would decrease in the long run)

End result: a kind of a symbiotic relationship between a gray hat hacker and a standard web content provider.

Re: CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers

#99

Post by PietdeVries »

dmichulke wrote: post #98

Here's a gray market "business model": - Hacker H hacks site, injects cryptomining script - Because H doesn't want other hackers to do the same, he will make the site secure and thereby kind of "maintain" it (in a security sense) - Because H doesn't want the site to slow down endlessly, he will use cryptomining "as much as possible" while still keeping the site sufficiently responsive (otherwise traffic would go down…

I have heard of malware that does more or less the same: exploit a vulnerability, but patch it as soon as it has access to prevent others from exploiting it too.

While your plan makes sense, I can see a future where there are two big gray-market parties left that use the equipment under their control to attack the other party, and not mine crypto...

Re: CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers

#100

Post by flukus »

chii wrote: post #25
ringaroundthetx wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monero? Existing botnets earn $50,000/day mining on people's computers at night while finding ways to spread to additional ones. A single computer earns pennies, a couple hundred thousand earn way more.

A customer base of hundreds thousands doing streaming will cost you way more than $50k/day.

Unless you just package it and let youtube do the actual streaming. Imagine creating "cat-videos.com" and embedding all the youtube videos into the site but providing a better UI for browsing them.
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